Sales and marketing teams are two sides of the same coin. Both are deeply engaged with customers and aim to provide a high-quality experience that promotes your brand, guides prospects through the sales funnel and ultimately leads to more purchases. Though we often hear about misalignment between sales and marketing across industries and verticals, there’s a secret weapon for driving sales enablement hiding in marketing: your public relations team.
Here are two ways to leverage your PR efforts to maximize sales enablement.
1. Use internal comms to circulate PR content
While the primary function of PR teams is to land your company public recognition, unless your organization is reading the publications you’re gaining placement in or attending the events you’ve scored speaking engagements at, they probably aren’t aware of any material that goes along with your PR effort. Leverage your internal communication channels—employee newsletters, leadership memos, a company intranet or workspace channel, departmental or all-hands meetings—to share recent coverage, events and speaking engagements.
The goal is to provide direct access to any material related to PR activity and then encourage awareness in all teams. For sales in particular, the goal is to use and share PR material with prospects and customers at key moments in the customer journey. It also ensures that your sales teams are seeing the same thing that customers and prospects may come across and reference or have questions about.
Some examples of PR activity-related material are:
- Press coverage
- Public statements and press releases
- Mentions in external blogs or social media
- Executive bylines
- Presentation decks from speaking events
- Inclusion in reports from market research firms
- Award nominations or wins
2. Take advantage of media monitoring and social listening tools
PR teams are equipped with the right tools and resources to let them easily monitor the media landscape for trends, competitor activity and brand sentiment. The 24/7 news cycle means that your company and leaders always have a chance of being discussed in public forums, and your PR teams are often the first to be alerted when they are.
Social media listening tools allow PR teams to track exactly what customers think about you and how they’re discussing the brand and its competitors. By tuning into the conversations real-life customers and prospects are having, PR teams can arm sales with data and insights that may not be readily shared when they’re face-to-face with customers. Sales can leverage the insider knowledge gained through social listening tools to better craft the way they approach or communicate with customers to close deals, such as using specific keywords in conversation or addressing particular pain points more organically.
Like sharing positive or negative sentiment seen on social media, PR teams should be communicating any developing stories or trends within your industry or ancillary fields to support sales enablement. Having an open, direct line between the sales and PR teams offers a quick way to communicate any potential or existing news that could impact customer interaction (for better or worse). Sales staying abreast of what the PR team is seeing in the media landscape can help to proactively put into motion your crisis plan so you’re managing a situation rather than triaging adverse effects to sales effect. It can also equip sales with a forecast for upcoming shifts in industry, economics, competition or other trends they can use to their advantage in driving the customer journey.
